The Voyage of Their Life

by Diane Armstrong

  Harold felt reassured when his uncle pointed to a whole newspaper column of positions vacant for cabinet-makers. During his interview at Smith & Brown, Auckland’s biggest furniture firm, his uncle did the talking.

  ‘My nephew is a qualified furniture-maker, he has been trained to make an entire piece of furniture from the timber stack to the customer’s home. He can work in assembly or in the machine shop, but he can’t speak English yet,’ he said.

  The manager slapped his shoulder. ‘That’s perfect,’ he said. ‘Someone who can work and not talk!’

  Harold started off earning nine pounds five shillings a week, which was a very good wage, but before long they were paying him well above award wages because they asked him to make prototypes. ‘They worked very differently here,’ he remarks. ‘In Estonia a cabinet-maker had to do everything from assembly work to machine shop and French polishing, but here every aspect of the operation was kept separate.’

  When an Estonian friend offered to lend him 1400 pounds, he jumped at the opportunity to buy a place of their own on Marlborough Road, much closer to the city. With his wages from the furniture factory, and the wedding and confirmation dresses that Alide made, they paid the house off in five years and borrowed again to buy a 1954 Hillman, which became their pride and joy.

  By then Harold had teamed up with another Estonian and opened the Contemporary Furniture Factory at Mt Roskill. Thanks to Harold’s expertise, they became so successful that before long they supplied shops all over New Zealand and had orders for several months ahead, but eventually the partnership broke up.

  Seeing an opportunity to buy a quarter-acre lot, the Kapps borrowed 900 pounds from their friends and built the home in Sandringham where Harold lives to this day. By then they had been married for ten years, but were still childless. When tests showed that Harold had a low sperm count, they decided to adopt a baby. The first child they were offered died in hospital, the second they refused because he was dark-skinned while they were both fair, but the third time round they were delighted when a healthy white baby boy became available. Alide bought a baby bath, bassinet and pram, attended classes to learn how to take care of a baby, and two weeks later they brought little Arvo home.

  At first everything went smoothly. Harold points to a photo on the shelf behind him of a smiling little boy with smoothly brushed hair, beside a photograph of his wife. ‘When Arvo was two or three years old, he started having nightmares,’ he recalls. ‘He often walked in his sleep and sometimes I would wake up to see him standing beside our bed. He didn’t make a sound but I always knew he was there. I would take him back to his cot, but he would come out again. Something was wrong with him.’

  At school the boy couldn’t keep up with his classmates and the teachers described him as lazy and absent-minded. Whatever the reason, his mind was always far away and he couldn’t take things in. Whenever Alide cut sandwiches at the school tuck shop, she was upset when the other mothers talked about their children’s homework, because Arvo always told her he didn’t have any. When she took him for a professional assessment, the psychologist failed to diagnose the problem.

  With his poor scholastic record, studying was out of the question, but Arvo refused to learn a trade and became the mail boy at Amalgamated Theatres instead. When he packed his bag one Friday night and said goodbye to his parents, they thought he was going on a tramping excursion with the scouts, but on Monday morning his boss rang to ask whether Arvo was sick because he hadn’t turned up at work. Harold and Alide were shocked. They had no idea where he was.

  He stayed away for fourteen months. ‘He sent us one postcard from Wanganui to say he wasn’t coming home any more,’ Harold says in his quiet, even way. ‘My wife was upset but she had been upset with him for a long time. They didn’t get on. He did come back for a while, but later went away again. Once he came to see me when he knew she was away, but otherwise we hardly heard from him.

  ‘When I went to the South Island for a holiday in 1981, I looked him up,’ Harold says. ‘I thought maybe being adopted was part of his problem so I asked if he’d like to find out who his parents were, perhaps he wanted to contact them. His reaction was, “They gave me away and didn’t look for me all these years, so why should I look for them?” ’

  His adopted son came to see him once after his mother’s death. ‘He was very agitated that time. He used terrible language, swore at me, called me names and threw a cup of coffee across the room.’

  Harold sighs. ‘In spite of all the problems, I still regard him as my son and when I die I’ll make sure he is provided for. For his last birthday I sent him a pair of shorts, a shirt and some underwear. He never writes, but last September he sent me a card in shaky handwriting, probably because of the medication he takes. That was the first Father’s Day card he ever sent me.’

  34

  As the Spirit of Progress rattled along the rails from Melbourne to Sydney in November 1948, Lars Meder sat beside his mother, his freckled nose pressed against the window as he took in the parched countryside, so different from the summery greenness of Estonia. As soon as they walked out of Sydney’s Central station, he smelled the sourish odour of hops in the air. Pointing to a sign on top of the building facing the station, he asked his mother what it meant. Although Elisabeth Meder spoke fluent English, ‘Tooheys’ was one word she had never come across, but for once consulting her dictionary didn’t help. As Lars laughs about this word which no longer needs translating, I’m intrigued by the selectiveness of memory. After fifty years, this is what he remembers of his first glimpse of Sydney.

  Along with other passengers destined for New Zealand, including Alide and Harold Kapp, Lars and his mother had come to Sydney to take the Wanganella ferry to Auckland. In view of Lars’s later career, however, it was a stroke of luck that the ferry had recently run aground. With the Wanganella out of commission, the only way of making the trans-Tasman crossing was by flying boat. As the pontoon wobbled and swayed under their feet, Lars could hardly wait to climb into the aircraft. The doors slammed shut, the pilot clambered into the cockpit, adjusted his earphones and revved the motor to a deafening roar. The whole cabin shuddered so violently that Lars wondered whether the plane was going to fall apart. Then they were off, the water spraying up above the windows on both sides. Lars had never heard of a flying boat, and as it sped off in the water, skimming the waves, he wondered whether it would hurtle across the sea all the way to New Zealand. Suddenly there was a surge of power and the horizon tilted as they took flight. Lars wanted to whoop with joy as they rose above the city and into the clouds.

  ‘That was my first taste of flying and it affected my whole life,’ he smiles. ‘Until then I wanted to become an engine driver, but from that moment I knew I’d become a pilot. Although I’ve retired, I’m still flying, but only part-time these days.’

  We are talking at Lars’s home at Takapuna, with his older brother Jens who migrated to New Zealand after the rest of the family. It’s an easy walk to the beach and the sprawling shopping centres that have replaced the simple corner shops with their white bread, Amber Tips tea and Chesdale cheese where Elisabeth Meder shopped over fifty years ago. The modern townhouse is bright and inviting with vivid prints on the walls and stylish furniture that wouldn’t look out of place in a home decorating magazine. From the large family photograph on the wall, I can see that his two dark-haired daughters take after their attractive mother. ‘My wife is one-eighth Maori and English,’ Lars says.

  Lars has a friendly, laid-back manner that puts me immediately at ease. The reddish hair has thinned out now and his face has become rounder, but he still has the placid personality he had as a twelve year old on the Derna. As he talks, I realise that he is the first of the passengers I have met in New Zealand whose life seems to have unfolded smoothly, without stress or tragedy.

  Our conversation is frequently interrupted by telephone calls for his wife and daughters, and in between answering the phone and relaying messages in his good-n
atured way, Lars reminisces about his arrival in Auckland. After seven exhilarating hours in the air, the flying boat taxied to the pontoon and as they peered through the water-streaked window, his mother suddenly pointed, ‘Look! There’s your father!’

  All that Lars knew about New Zealand was from the postage stamps and parcels that his father sent them in Germany, but he didn’t remember his father at all. After Captain Meder’s ship had been torpedoed between Portugal and England at the beginning of the war, his mother had let everyone believe that he had died along with most of the crew, so the Russians wouldn’t come looking for him. She never talked about him to Lars in case he let something slip, and it wasn’t until after the war was over that he discovered his father was alive and working in the merchant marine in Canada, and that they would all meet again in New Zealand.

  While Lars is taking another message for his daughter, Jens resumes the story. ‘Our grandparents lost everything in World War I, and our parents lost everything in World War II, so Father had enough of Europe,’ he says. Several years older than his brother, Jens combs his white hair straight back from his ruddy face and speaks in a booming voice with a strong Estonian accent.

  Their father had chosen New Zealand because of its progressive social welfare legislation, which had been widely reported in Estonian newspapers before the war. During the 1930s, the Labor government had introduced visionary reforms that provided New Zealanders with pensions and allowances covering unemployment, sickness, poverty and old age. Families received benefits of one pound per week, school children were given dental care and free milk and there was a public housing program. A country with a government that protected its citizens from womb to tomb seemed the ideal place to live.

  Unlike other children from the Derna who found it difficult to adjust to living with fathers they didn’t know, Lars and his father were friends from the beginning. As New Zealand did not recognise his maritime qualifications, instead of studying again, Lars’s father bought a thirty-two-foot launch, converted it into a fishing trawler and made a good living in waters that teemed with snapper and flounder. In the mid-1950s he capitalised on the demand for shark. ‘The wealth was actually in the shark liver which was processed into pharmaceuticals, vitamins and cosmetics,’ Lars recalls. ‘Dad only had room for forty shark carcasses on board and when his two forty-four-gallon drums were full of shark liver, he had to jettison the carcasses.’

  With the income from fishing, the Meders were able to buy a four-bedroom home in Herne Bay Road which Lars’s practical mother helped to pay off by renting out two rooms for Bed & Breakfast. But the shark bonanza ended abruptly in the 1960s when traces of mercury were found in the shark meat.

  There was no bigger treat for Lars than going out with his father on the boat. ‘I always knew that we’d have an adventure, or meet some colourful characters who told better stories than I read in my books. My father had a gift for striking up friendships with hermits, prospectors and old sailors. I remember an old recluse in Coromandel who started off my collection of Maori artifacts with a Maori axe.’

  Although most of his memories are pleasant, there was one terrifying night he cannot forget. ‘We anchored in the usual place in the Coromandel Peninsula and everything seemed normal, but after a few hours we heard what sounded like thunder. It was water, rushing with a power I’d never seen before. For some reason, the tide had suddenly changed and the current was so strong that we drifted for miles until we finally ran aground. Usually a tide takes six hours to go out, but this time it only took forty minutes. Imagine the power! On the way we picked up a lot of flotsam and jetsam, and got dragged out to sea with a huge log stuck in our bow. Even by daybreak the tide hadn’t returned to normal. When we got back we found out that there had been a massive earthquake in Chile and that’s what had caused this freak tidal wave.’

  While Lars answers the phone yet again, Jens, who owns a chain of bakeries, expounds on his own economic theory. ‘I thought about it for a long time and discovered that it’s not hard work, but saving and investing that creates wealth. If everyone was induced to save money and buy their own home, there would be no more Communism, because people with assets don’t become Communists,’ Jens says in his forceful way. He has retained his antipathy towards Communism even after the Soviet Union has disintegrated and the Communists have been overthrown.

  Lars puts down the receiver and with a nostalgic smile recalls his school days, golden days that stretched through endless summers. As I listen to this affable man, I cannot help thinking that personality dictates destiny. It can’t just be chance that has made his life so uncomplicated. At Bayview Primary School, the teachers and pupils were kind and the worst thing he remembers is that some of his school buddies who were assigned to teach him English taught him swear words instead, which aroused consternation among the teachers but hysterical giggling among the boys. Life was a wonderful adventure spent chasing each other along Herne Bay Beach, splashing in Cox’s Creek, diving off Ponsonby Wharf and racing each other in the Shelly Beach swimming pool.

  The longing to become a pilot, which began with that flight on the flying boat, persisted throughout his school days. While at Mt Albert Grammar School, Lars joined the air cadet corps, but to his disappointment they stopped flying lessons before he had time to learn. Undaunted, he resolved to pay for the lessons himself. He gave up his Sundays and rose early on Monday and Friday mornings before school and ran to the bakery where he rolled dough, cut out doughnuts, scrubbed the bowls and cleaned the benchtops, until he’d saved enough for Saturday’s flying lesson.

  ‘I joined the Auckland Aero Club, got my commercial pilot’s licence in December 1960, and I’ve been flying ever since,’ he beams. ‘When I started off, the airline was called the National Airways Corporation, but it later became affiliated with Air New Zealand.’ After being obliged to retire at fifty-five, he started flying for EVA Air, the Taiwanese airline. ‘When I turned sixty, I had to retire from EVA Air as well, but I missed flying, so now I fly with Air Pacific as a co-pilot. The ego thing doesn’t worry me. I don’t have to be the captain, I just love flying,’ he says. ‘But when I turn sixty-three I’ll definitely retire. I’ll spend most of my time sailing and fishing.’

  35

  Stepping onto the small platform at North Geelong station, I wonder how I will recognise Pauline Seitz, but before I have time to look around, a tall, big-boned woman in loose-cut slacks with a string of large beads around her neck strides towards me with a big smile. Even before we’ve introduced ourselves she wraps her arms around me in a hug, and we walk along the street chatting like old friends.

  Pauline contacted me several months before to say that she had also arrived on the Derna as a child. I assumed that she was calling in response to the notices I had placed in ethnic newspapers and on radio programs, but as it turned out, she knew nothing about my search for passengers. Her curiosity had been aroused by an article I had written about the fiftieth anniversary of the arrival of post-war migrant ships, and she had done some impressive detective work to track me down.

  Thanks to her tenacity, the story I got to hear was a multicultural saga that included Germans and Russians and spanned the Caucasus, Iran and Germany. Like Lars Meder, Pauline had also crossed the seas with her mother to join a father she didn’t know. Being of German origin, he had been deported from Teheran by the British as an enemy alien in 1941 and sent to an internment camp in Australia. Pauline was ten days old at the time, and neither she nor her mother had seen him from that day until they arrived in Australia seven years later.

  Now, in Geelong, as we turn into a street of old-fashioned cottages surrounded by picket fences and step into her front garden, she says, ‘Isn’t it amazing to think that you and I must have seen each other on the Derna ? Maybe we even played together. And here we are, meeting again after all these years!’ Although we don’t recall ever playing together, the idea surprises and intrigues me. I have been so focused on the other passengers that I have f
orgotten to include myself among them. Perhaps this is the underlying motive for my search. By probing into the past, am I attempting to recover the serious little girl with brown plaits who spent the voyage watching and knitting?

  In Pauline’s country garden we step over clumps of forget-me-nots, patches of lettuce and a lone artichoke plant and enter the sunny sitting room where her tabby Firouz is asleep on the couch. On the bookshelf stand two carved wooden elephants, one of which has lost a tusk. ‘Remember Colombo?’ Pauline exclaims. ‘That’s where Mother and I bought those carvings.’

  A few minutes later her mother arrives and immediately the room becomes charged with energy. Vala, who also lives in Geelong, is a born storyteller and launches into a lively account of her convent days in Teheran. She embellishes the anecdotes with her flair for drama, pausing for effect at just the right moment and leaping to her feet to mimic the admonitions of the nuns and the swishing gait of the mother superior up the stairs. It’s a virtuoso performance that has me hanging on every word. Even Pauline, who must have heard it a hundred times, listens with rapt attention.

  ‘You can tell I always wanted to go on the stage!’ Vala exclaims, and mother and daughter go into peals of laughter.

  While Pauline pours us strong coffee and slices her freshly baked apple cake, Vala describes an incident in Ankara when the German politician von Ribbentrop arrived to visit the women being repatriated to Germany. She has an excellent command of English and speaks with the careful enunciation of those who have learned it as a foreign language.